How did you deal with the tension between telling a gripping story and being rigorous about facts?Ī.The beauty of using 6 degrees of warming as a framing is you can have it both ways. Q.There was a similar magazine piece to your book that got a lot of attention in the States by David Wallace Wells, which came under criticism for conflating the worst-case scenarios with the likeliest future. Lynas recently spoke with Grist about how much has changed in the last 15 years, how the COVID 19 pandemic resembles climate change, and how he manages to live happily while carrying the knowledge of looming doom. There’s so much new evidence that Lynas had to start over and write an entirely new book built on the same structure as the old one. Sea levels have climbed 6 centimeters, and evidence that fossil-fuel emissions are amplifying hurricanes has solidified. Back in 2007, Lynas published another book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, but in the intervening years the climate changed so rapidly that he decided it needed not just an update, but a top-to-bottom rewrite.Īs of 2015, a world warmed by 1 degree is reality, not a speculative future.
Lynas is known for his ability to spin stultifying scientific evidence into compelling prose and for conducting long-simmering public debates with other public intellectuals. So at what point do sweaty summers and mild winters turn into extinction and the collapse of civilization?Ī new book fills that knowledge gap: Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas, an influential environmentalist in England. A few degrees of warming doesn’t sound that bad, maybe no more dangerous than nudging up your thermostat. If you are like most people, you have a sense that climate change is bad, but would be hard-pressed to explain the exact consequences of each additional degree of heat. To paraphrase Ron Burgundy, things escalate quickly. Three degrees would be a hotter world than our species has ever experienced: The last time the temperatures rose that high was 2 million years before the evolution of homo sapiens.Ĭreep up another 2 degrees, and it could lead to the greatest mass extinction in earth’s history. Two degrees could mean crop failures and 500,000 deaths from malnutrition a year.
The global thermostat has gone up 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, and rivers of meltwater are now coursing off Greenland’s glaciers.
15 July 2020 | The story of our warming planet can be told by degrees.
0 kommentar(er)
